The new, unsealed indictment against Eric Adams, accusing him of a range of crimes over nearly a decade, is significant for any number of reasons: Mr. Adams is the first mayor in New York history to face federal indictment while in office and also, to my knowledge, the first sitting mayor in American history indicted on charges of acting at the behest not of his constituents but of a foreign power.
But Mr. Adams isn’t accused of simply acting as a foreign agent, as were other officials recently, like former Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Linda Sun, a top aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York. He is accused of something more insidious: injecting foreign funds directly into his election campaigns, compromising not only the mayor’s office but also American elections.
According to the indictment, Mr. Adams crafted networks to open the floodgates of foreign financing directly into an American election — all for his and his foreign partners’ benefit. This goes far beyond accepting or providing favors or glad-handing with foreign officials. While the sums are not necessarily large, what nearly a decade of Mr. Adams accepting Turkish money shows is that U.S. democracy is for sale, sometimes for as little as a luxury flight and a nice night in a hotel.
Indeed, Mr. Adams’s brazenness is almost breathtaking. Not only did he enjoy luxurious trips around the world — trips whose provenance he then hid from the public — but he also organized campaign donations from foreigners, despite being fully aware that it was against the law. When one of Mr. Adams’s staff members checked whether they could, in the words of the indictment, organize “unlawful foreign contributions,” Mr. Adams readily agreed and “directed” the staff member to pursue the funds.
Nor was this a one-time affair, according to the allegations. For years, both before and after his election as mayor, Mr. Adams is accused of pulling in foreign donation after foreign donation. Much of it was masked behind so-called straw donors, whose identities as American citizens could be used to thwart investigators. Mr. Adams and his inner circle are accused of going to remarkable, even at times ridiculous, lengths to conceal the payments, parceling them out to try to evade regulations. Even when investigators came calling, attempts to hide evidence of the payments are reported to have continued. In this case, it wasn’t just the crime or the cover-up that would be the real scandal but both.
In just the past few months, we’ve seen a blistering pace of indictments involving everyone from leading think tankers to conservative influencers to members of Congress. In August we even saw new details that should lead to foreign lobbying charges against a member of the president’s family — as well as revelations about suspicious foreign money that might have been funneled into Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. For years, researchers and investigators focused on foreign influence campaigns have banged the drum about the threats of foreign agents running amok in the U.S., thanks in large part to the rise of figures like Mr. Trump.
Yet the concern that foreign governments weren’t simply siccing lobbyists on American officials but also inserting money into American elections outright has, until this indictment, gone largely unsubstantiated. Given the shambolic regulations surrounding American election financing, this concern was hardly unwarranted. Moreover, given the fact that American lobbyists can freely donate to the same U.S. officials they lobby on behalf of foreign benefactors — a massive loophole that researchers like the scholar Ben Freeman have painstakingly tracked and detailed — there appeared every incentive for foreign nations to try to flood American elections with financing.
Now, with the Adams indictment, we have the leader of the most prominent American city rising to power allegedly, at least in part, on the back of financing from foreign officials thousands of miles away. We have a mayor who is accused of taking an active lead in setting up network after network to draw in foreign financing, even instructing his staff on foreign figures to tap and ways to hide the financial details from investigators. We have a mayor who is, for all intents and purposes, accused of being a foreign agent, acting not at the behest of other New Yorkers but for his benefactors in Turkey.
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